All that is right and wrong with sports, video games, girls, beer, and everything in between.

Friday, April 2, 2010

0.0

I’ll get on with Bali/KL stuff soon. I still have a lot of ground to cover there. Tonight, I want to talk movies.

I’ve been having bad luck with movies as of late. I saw “Up in the Air” and “Inglorious Basterds” a couple weeks ago, and I enjoyed both quite a bit. Of course, as an airline nerd, I had to question why Clooney’s company in “Air” was based in Omaha. One would think that a consulting firm that required such frequent travel would be in a city with a real airport.

Since watching those, my luck has gotten a bit worse. I downloaded “Sideways,” but after all the hype I’d heard about it (5 years ago, I know) it was kinda meh. I never really got too involved. On the night I downloaded Sideways, I also started downloads on “Syriana” and “This Film is not yet Rated,” the latter an interesting-sounding documentary on why some films with minimal “offensive” material end up with “R” ratings. It took two days to get Syriana. Once I got it, I discovered that it had the original voice track, but was also overdubbed in Russian or Latvian or some harsh sounding Eastern European tongue, and there was no way to turn the dubbing off. Delete. The other movie took longer to get, as there were not many sources available. Once I got it, it turned out to be the DVD portion with the director’s commentary. Really? Who the hell watches the director’s commentary track, especially on a minor film’s DVD? Delete. You get what you pay for sometimes, I suppose.

While perusing Rotten Tomatoes (okay, listening to an Adam Carolla podcast about movies) I learned that “Good Luck Chuck” received a 0.0 out of 100 from the major critics category. Amongst the general public, it surged up to a 0.5 out of 100. All signs pointed to this being the worst movie of all time.

I decided to watch it, so you don’t have to. Don’t say Nintendo v Nascar never does anything to help the people. Download time for this one - 27 minutes, and it played like a champ. A 2007 movie with a 0.0 rating. Sometimes, I hate the internet. As I was in Korea for all of 2007, I knew absolutely nothing of this movie. I went in completely fresh.

The movie opened with a group of grade school kids playing spin the bottle. Youthful Charlie, our hero, landed on a 5th grade goth girl. They went into the closet, and she wasn’t just into necking, she wanted to engage in intercourse. Charlie, being a grade school kid, wasn’t into that, so the goth girl put a hex on him. The hex was that every girl he dated would then marry the next dude that she dated after him. We have a premise. Hey, I’ve seen some bad movie concepts in my day, this didn’t seem 0.0 worthy. Plus, this was a relatable concept for me. For no less than three girls, I was the second-last person for them to kiss/hook up with in some capacity before meeting their husband/getting married. Hell, I made out with this girl in a bar in Jeonju last weekend and later found out she was engaged, so make that four.

Smash cut to modern times. Holy fuck, it’s Dane Cook. Nope, this movie no longer has potential. I consider deleting it immediately, but soldier through. Dane is with a girl on the beach, and he can’t return an “I love you” while getting head. She dumps him. Plenty realistic so far. Dane is too moral to lie to a girl that’s in the process of blowing him.

We see Dane and his fat sidekick at work. Dane is a dentist, and his sidekick does boob jobs. Dane is unhappy, his sidekick is happy. Dane has an assistant. She is hefty and black. Imagine my surprise when she also turned out to be sassy.

Dane and his fat sidekick go to a wedding. The fat guy, shockingly, isn’t good with the ladies, but he has lots of bad pick up lines. The bride at this wedding is Dane’s ex, and apparently she met her husband through him. It seems the hex worked. The girl from the beach is also at the wedding, presumably because she was Dane’s date before they broke up and still went anyway. We see her making out with some random guy it the wedding. Wonder if they’ll get hitched?

Jessica Alba shows up. Hmm, she’s famous, I wonder if her and Dane will hit it off? She’s clumsy in a way that should involve wearing a helmet. She works with penguins in some sort of aquarium joint.

I was a bit annoyed to see Alba. She’s hot, of course, but everyone knows she never gets naked in movies, and she doesn’t bring a whole lot else to the table. At this early juncture of the film, gratuitous nudity is all I can hope for.

Anyhow, Dane courts Alba for 10 or 15 minutes of screen time. She rebuffs him. She never has any reason to whatsoever, other than the fact that Dane Cook is the very definition of douchebag. The beach chick gets married. Other women hear of Dane’s legend, if they bang him, they will meet their soul mate. For some reason, Dane is opposed to this idea, then his fat sidekick convinces him otherwise.

In the most disturbing gratuitous nudity montage of all time (lotsa tits, yeah, but Dane Cook also prominently involved in every frame) Dane plows his way through 734 or so women, including his sassy assistant. This leaves him feeling empty and sad, because the women all meet their future husbands and get hitched within 45 minutes of coitus. BTW, I kept wondering about these future husbands. I personally wouldn’t have sex with a girl that had ever been to a Dane Cook live event, much less marry a girl that had actually porked Dane-o.

Dane starts chasing after Alba again. He goes to her stupid penguin show and they talk about bullshit penguin stuff. Dane finds out from Josh from 30 Rock (Alba’s brother in the movie) that she had been talking about him, since he gave her free dental work earlier in the movie. She talks about her hero, this penguin PhD dude (hmm, wonder if she’ll meet him after having sex with Dane, thus setting herself up to get married?) but decides to go out with Dane. After a few dates, she’s ready to throw down. As she’s undressing (off camera of course, stupid Alba) Dane gets a call from his fat sidekick... and answers the phone! You know, because most of us guys answer the damn cell phone when our idiot buddies call and we’re about to have sex with our presumed soul mates for the first time. The fat sidekick tells Dane that ALL of the women that he had hooked up with in the montage got married. Dane reacted as if though this wasn’t something he didn’t already fucking know, even though he clearly knew about it before. So he leaves.

Anyway, everything predictable from before happens. Dane and Alba later hook up. Then they break up, because he tries too hard. Then Dane tracks down the goth girl from the first scene, and she tells him if he loves her, set her free, blah blah. Dane hooks Alba up with the penguin nerd guy, and he’s a retard klutz too. In the horrible climax, Dane finds out she’s going to Antarctica with him to study penguins. He goes to the airport, turns out Anytown International has TWO connecting flights to fucking Antarctica that day, and Dane buys tickets for both for $17,000 to get past security. He talks to Alba, and Penguin nerd is married anyway, and she isn’t moving to Antarctica but coming back on Wednesday.